With the increasing incidence of identity theft and other misuse of private or proprietary information, the desirability and necessity of protecting such information is becoming increasingly important. In recent years, laws have been passed in various jurisdictions regulating the use and protection by businesses, health care providers, and other entities, of sensitive or private information on customers, patients, and the like. At the federal level in the United States, the HIPAA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley laws require specific measures, such as document shredding, in order to comply with the laws' provisions for protecting certain designated types of information.
Discarding sensitive documents in an unshredded state is risky, because identity thieves, investigative journalists, and other unscrupulous individuals often engage in “dumpster diving” to retrieve documents from trash dumpsters or garbage cans. Accordingly, the demand for document shredding has surged. For entities having a small amount of documents requiring shredding, personal-sized shredders that are purchased or leased may be adequate. However, for many businesses and other organizations, the large volume of documents and other materials to be shredded makes such an approach impractical. Accordingly, document-shredding service providers have arisen to meet the increasing demand for large-volume shredding.
In the early history of document-shredding services, typically the documents to be shredded were picked up by the service provider and transported to a central facility for shredding. This form of shredding service is still prevalent today. Central document shredding certainly can accomplish its intended purpose, if carried out properly. The drawbacks to central shredding include the necessity of strictly safeguarding the documents against theft or unauthorized access throughout the entire chain of custody from the time the documents are picked up from the customer to the time they are shredded, the necessity of properly documenting the chain of custody and the measures taken to safeguard the documents, and the fact that the users cannot independently verify that the documents were in fact shredded. This latter factor can give rise to a general sense of unease among some users of central shredding services.
Consequently, there is now a trend toward on-site document shredding using mobile shredders. A mobile shredder generally consists of a truck having a shredder mounted therein, and a storage volume for storing the shredded material. Typically, the users place the materials to be shredded in bins or “toters” that usually have wheels for rolling the bins to a location for pickup, such as a curbside location on a street. Mobile shredders typically have some type of bin lift and dump unit, such as those commonly employed on garbage collection trucks, for lifting the bins and emptying them into the shredder. Mobile shredding, however, also has certain drawbacks, including high labor costs, frequent pickups, high fuel costs, high truck maintenance costs, and security issues arising from delays in shredding confidential documents.
What is needed, therefore, is an efficient, low-cost alternative to the industry-standard techniques of central-facility shredding and mobile on-site document shredding.